An Expert Elicitation of Public Acceptance of Renewable Energy in Kenya

Abstract

This article reports evidence for substantial public support for the large-scale deployment of three renewable energy options in Kenya: wind, solar PV, and geothermal energy. With these renewable technologies, the government of Kenya could make a large contribution to reaching its national commitment under the Paris Agreement. Prices, infrastructural needs, and land-use requirements importantly contribute to shaping public opinion about these renewable energy alternatives, in different ways and directions for wind, PV, and geothermal energy. While overall the evaluation of these technologies is positive, public authorities should be wary of the possible inconveniences and drawbacks associated with them. Anticipating and, where possible, mitigating these shortcomings in national climate and energy development plans could preclude some of them becoming possible hindrances for broad-scale adoption of wind, PV, and geothermal energy. Furthering quantitative public acceptance studies, like the one presented here based on (semi-)expert elicitation and information-choice questionnaires, can assist in Kenya fully reaching its national climate and energy ambitions. More generally, we argue that the establishment of affordable, clean, and secure energy systems, as well as the mitigation of global climate change, can benefit from stakeholder engagement and public survey analysis like the one performed in our study-in developing countries as much as in the developed part of the world.

A Review of Energy Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa as a Transition Pathway to Energy Democracy

“…We found that most SSA government actors in the energy sector engage in top-down approaches that superficially involve the public in validation workshops and interviews after project decisions are made [81][82][83]. Other top-down approaches are expert-centred in that experts are tasked with developing energy solutions with little or no participation from the communities they are designing for [11,77,82,83]. These top-down approaches, coupled with the structural inequalities rampant in SSA countries have hampered the transition towards more democratic and sustainable energy systems [36,37].…”

“…There was a consensus in the literature that local communities should be engaged from the onset to the end of the project. The table below summarizes the key arguments for stakeholder engagement in community projects in SSA [52,54,68,[72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84]. A co-design form of engagement was proposed by various authors as an effective strategy for engaging different stakeholders at all levels [52,54,80,81].…”

Involving Citizens in Heat Planning: A Participatory Process Design for Informed Decision-Making

“…Information-choice Questionnaires (ICQs) were originally developed to provide respondents with the necessary information to reach informed opinions about complex topics [34]. ICQs have been applied in the field of energy in recent years on the topics of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) [35][36][37] and renewable energy in Kenya [38]. Previous research on ICQs has shown that opinions change after information was provided, confirming the use of providing information prior to asking one's opinion on a topic which they have little knowledge about.…”

The role of community energy systems to facilitate energy transitions in Ethiopia and Mozambique

“…This is a common issue across other SSA countries where government or elite organizations wholly own projects without transferring power to local communities [55,56,35,11,50,33]. This has resulted in limited community involvement through top-down approaches [17,[57][58][59], similar to those in the United States [17].…”